Apple Has Brainwashed The Whole Country — How Else To Explain The Lack Of Outrage Over Apple’s Secret Location Tracking?

Your iPhone has been secretly tracking and recording everywhere you go.

That’s right. Apple built this feature into your iPhone and hid it from you. By doing so, Apple made it possible for anyone who gets ahold of your iPhone or Mac (or any other device synced with either) to figure out exactly where you were when.

That is absolutely outrageous.

If any other company had done this, America’s privacy zealots would be demanding the CEO’s resignation. There would be threats. There would be lawsuits. There would, at the very least, be incessant demands for the company to acknowledge the behavior, explain it, and apologize for it.

And yet, because the company is Apple, there have been none of those things.

Apple built a system into your iPhone that secretly tracks and records everywhere you go. This system records your exact location and the exact time you were there–down to the second.

Anyone who gets ahold of your phone or computer can tell exactly where you were when: Police, people suing you, your husband/wife, your employer, private investigators, the government–anyone. And Apple didn’t tell you that!

Please explain, with a straight face, how that could possibly be a “mistake.”

And let’s say hypothetically that it actually was a mistake. That Apple didn’t mean to build that system that tracks and records everywhere you go and then keep it a secret. Let’s say, hypothetically, that it was some rogue Apple engineer who built that system into iOS without telling his or her superiors and that Apple has only recently discovered it.

Well, then, Apple should already have apologized profusely, explained that the engineer has now been summarily dismissed, and offered a software update that eliminates the tracking system forever.

Has Apple done that?

Heck no!

Apple hasn’t even acknowledged the problem, let alone apologize for it or do something about it.

This alone should make clear to everyone that it wasn’t a “mistake.”

Again: Your Apple iPhone has been secretly tracking and recording everywhere you go.

If that news doesn’t make you furious at Apple–both for doing it in the first place and then for not acknowledging that they’re doing it and explaining why–there’s only one explanation for why it doesn’t.

Apple has so mesmerized you that you live in the reality distortion field.

Androids Know Where You Are Too

The Apple iPhone is reportedly not the only phone that tracks users’ locations in an unencrypted database. Google’s Android phones track location too, according to new reports which says that data is going right back to the companies.

On Wednesday a couple of tech researchers revealed that the Apple iPhone’s iOS4 operating system was tracking mobile-phone users’ whereabouts using cell-phone tower triangulation and storing that information in an unencrypted file. The researchers said the data, while not encrypted, appeared to be accessible to the person in possession of the phone only, but they were not sure whether the data was being sent back to Apple.

Today, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the iPhone location data is in fact going to Apple and that smartphones that run on the Android operating system also keep track of user data and send that information back to Google.

Why is the data being collected? Apple and Google may be gathering the individual data into massive databases to help them figure out how to provide location-based services, according to the Journal, which cites data from research firm Gartner Inc., which says these databases could help them tap the $2.9 billion market for location-based services—expected to rise to $8.3 billion in 2014.

So it’s another case of technology companies and businesses that want to collect information on consumers butting up against individual privacy rights. The same type of issues have come up at Facebook, which in response to public outcry had to put the brakes on the ability of third-party app developers to gain access to users’ information.

Both Apple and Google have declined to comment on the findings, although the report cited a letter Apple allegedly sent to U.S. Representatives Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, last year which said that the company “intermittently” collects location data, including GPS coordinates of many iPhone users, and transmits that data to itself every 12 hours.

With smartphone usage on the rise, and Senator Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, making noise about the iPhone issue this week, it seems likely that the government will have to address this issue pretty soon.